Book Review

Comparative/World

This volume is the product of a colloquium held at the Center for Hellenic Studies in 1996. There are fifteen chapters, penned by sixteen participants. The first thirteen are topical: a specialist in the subfield in question surveys the interaction of war and society in a given premodern culture. The last two chapters cut across these disciplinary divides. The penultimate features a theoretical perspective that is informed by anthropological research (R. Brian Ferguson); the final chapter situates recurrent themes in a generalized historical framework (Victor Davis Hanson and Barry S. Strauss).	1
The thirteen core chapters are regionally grouped. The first four essays take us to early China (Robin Yates) and Japan (William Wayne Farris), pharaonic Egypt (Andrea M. Gnirs) and the Persian Empire (Pierre Briant). Unfortunately, a specialist on Mesopotamia was forced to withdraw at the last minute. A chapter that competently surveyed the changing face of warfare across the many centuries of ancient Near Eastern history would have been an invaluable addition to this mix.	2
The Mediterranean basin receives seven chapters. These are devoted to archaic and classical Greece (Kurt Raaflaub), the Hellenistic world (Charles D. Hamilton), republican (Nathan Rosenstein) and imperial Rome (Brian Campbell), Byzantium (John Haldon), the early medieval West (Bernard S. Bachrach), and early Islam (Patricia Crone). The later Roman Empire is conspicuous by its absence: Campbell gives it less than five pages. Two additional chapters traverse the Atlantic. Here a pair of anthropological specialists contribute papers on the Mayan (David Webster) and Aztec (Ross Hassig) worlds.	3
The editors claim as their rationale for the colloquium that "the interaction between military developments in Greece and Rome and their social, cultural, political, and economic contexts so far had [sic] not been studied systematically and comparatively" (p. 1). This comment slights an imposing literature—a point that they quickly concede with regard to archaic Greece, classical Athens, and republican Rome. One might immediately add imperial Rome, the study of which has benefited immensely from scholarly reaction to Edward N. Luttwak's The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire from the First Century A.D. to the Third (1976). The relevant literature on the later Roman Empire is equally impressive, offering such classics as Ramsay MacMullen's Soldier and Civilian in the Later Roman Empire (1963). Given the state of the evidence, it would also be difficult to generate new insights for Mycenaean and Dark Age Greece. What we know, and how we know it, have been efficiently distilled by Sarah B. Pomeroy et al. in Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History (1999).	4
Hence an unconvincing rationale, behind which lurk a number of structural and conceptual problems. While the other eleven essays report the current "state of the question," the distinction that Briant draws between Achaemenid parade and war armies is eccentric. Raaflaub combines an idiosyncratic critique of the beleaguered "hoplite revolution" in archaic Greece with a crisp but conventional analysis of the interplay between naval warfare and democratic politics. There is a very real danger that nonspecialists will fail to distinguish between the conventional and the controversial in this volume.	. . .